Parquet Courts' Light Up Gold is a gel-capsule-sized dosage of distilled NYC punk rock: vinegary smarts, reeled-off quotables ("It's a pretty long walk to the DMV," "Socrates died in the fucking gutter!" "At night we hum to Canada snoring"), and twiggy guitars. It's maximum-attitude, minimum-patience: not just smart, but frantically smart, blurting out everything it might have to say before the time clock expires. The songs are about things that matter a lot when you're in your 20s: Whether or not subsisting on cigarettes and Swedish fish is a feasible food budget ("Stoned and Starving"); fretting that you won't be as extraordinary as you hoped ("Borrowed Time"); enduring the stinking, unearned arrogance of older people (almost every song).

Accordingly, I show up in Williamsburg half-expecting to be piñata'd around by a couple of wiseasses. Instead, I spend an hour or so chatting with Austin Brown, 27, and Andrew Savage, 26, the band's principal songwriters and lead vocalists, who speak slowly, thoughtfully, and with fierce sincerity. After meeting at Savage's record-listening club-- called The Knights of the Round Turntable, no less-- while attending the University of North Texas in Denton, the two separately moved to New York a few years ago and were soon practicing with bassist Sean Yeaton and Savage's little brother Max. After offering up their debut cassette, American Specialties, at the tail end of 2011, the quartet put out Light Up Gold last August via Dull Tools; the album is being re-released by What's Your Rupture? next week. I spoke with Brown and Savage about avoiding the easiness of cynicism, worrying you might not write "the best thing ever," and the influence of DJ Screw.

"It's not in vogue to wear your emotions on your sleeve, because people take that to be too nostalgic or romantic-- but I don't."

Pitchfork: It sounds to me that there's a lot of character-driven writing in your lyrics. How important are the lyrics to you as a songwriter?

Andrew Savage: In Parquet Courts, the writing always comes first-- all the melodies and all the music are worked around the writing. And I love reading fiction, so a lot of my influences come from that: DeLillo, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and William T. Vollmann. But I really don't want this to be the band where people say, "They're influenced by fiction!"

In rock-- guitar-driven music, indie, whatever-- I don't think the role of lyrics are as important as it was in previous eras. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing-- a lot of the people who do focus on lyric writing are just kind of trying to prove that they're smart, and that was probably a goal of mine at one point. But I don't like that whole posture about lyric writing. To me, it's just important that things feel fresh, natural, and immediate-- it can sound stupid and simple and just about as rudimentary as it can, as long as it's fresh. I like the Fall, and Mark E. Smith just says the same thing over and over again-- his repetition is a huge influence on me.

Pitchfork: A lyric that jumped out to me on the album was, "This thickness is just enough to wade through," specifically because it's repeated.

AS: There's a lot of songs on the record about being a loner, about my first winter in New York, about borrowed time, about sitting around wanting to write, not being able to, and just feeling like I'm going to die and I might never write my best thing ever. Just stressing-out, like, "I'm a writer and I'm supposed to be writing, and I'm not-- everything feels so thick, and it's hard to move, and it's just thick enough to wade through."

Pitchfork: There's a quote from when you guys spoke to eMusic where you said, "One thing that lacks in the stuff they call indie rock is emotional honesty."

AS: Emotional honesty isn't encouraged in our generation; cynicism is encouraged. It's not in vogue really to wear your emotions on your sleeve, mostly because people take that to be too nostalgic or romantic-- but I don't. I think I'm able to portray my emotions accurately and honestly, and in a way that doesn't seem overly romantic or overly cynical. But the opposite is encouraged with our generation, and I haven't figured out why yet. Maybe it's because this youth culture that we exist in-- not really a counterculture, but more just young people doing creative stuff-- is a smaller reflection of the larger culture, our pop world, our American culture. But I like to think that there is such a thing as a counterculture, and that we are countering something in it. That's my goal. If no one else is gonna do it, you gotta do it.

Pitchfork: One of the first things you guys did was make a curated mixtape of your influences. There's a lot of things on it that make immediate sense: Pavement, Guided By Voices, the Fall. But then I saw Ol' Dirty Bastard and Houston rapper Mike Jones on there, too.

AS: We had a meeting when all four of us got together and I asked the question: Who are we influenced by? It was very conscious. New York is a huge influence on Parquet Courts. We started here, we are of this place. And as someone who likes to write, Wu-Tang Clan are important to me. They were all about being lyrically sharp. The Mike Jones song was an homage to us being from Texas, too.

Austin Brown: It was a huge part of my culture growing up. I'm from a really small town in southeast Texas called Beaumont, where Houston rap is huge. Screwed Up Click, UGK-- all that stuff was huge in my high school. I didn't realize how much I was influenced by this music and this culture until I left Texas; even when I left Beaumont and went to Denton, I realized that I knew all these things just by osmosis. It made me proud: I had a culture and an identity. It's still a part of who I am. I still remember the day DJ Screw died.

AS: One thing Parquet Courts does a lot, and what I've always liked to do a lot in recording, is slowing things down. On Light Up Gold, a lot of the guitars are slowed down, and some of the vocals are pitch-shifted to create a different texture. And, you know, screwed hip-hop is just good music to get fucked up to.

AB: I used to DJ a Houston rap night in Denton when I lived there.

Pitchfork: You should do that here in Brooklyn.

AB: I've thought about it, but I've never seen it work, partly because you can't smoke weed in bars. I would love to do it. You can just go ahead and put this out there: If there's an audience for it, I will do it, gladly. It's my dream. If we build it, they will come, I guess. Maybe one day.